Digby has another good post up about the driving forces behind American Foreign Policy under the Bush Administration. Here's an interesting snippet:
It is also the case that their animating principle in the first few
years of the administration was to do the exact opposite of Clinton in
all things. It was a simple, easy to remember formula (for simple,
forgetful people) that unfortunately led them to reject long-standing,
bipartisan foreign policy along with everything else. When you combined
the neocon and harcore hawk track records with a mandate to reject anything that Bill Clinton might have endorsed, you ended up with the hacktacular mishmash of sophomoric chest thumping, mindless military actions and conscious rejection all mutual understanding with our allies. It was an amazing thing to watch and I'm not sure we have enough distance from it yet to even begin to understand the full dimension of the errors that ensued.
Yes. In those awful early days of the Bush Administration, a lot of us liberals were licking our wounds over the recent Supreme Court Installation of Bush as President, but even with only half our attention span focused on Bush we could still see that Bush was determined to undermine ABSOLUTELY ANYTHING Clinton did while in the White House. I'm certain that if the White House Chef had told Bush that Clinton liked Cheeseburgers (purportedly one of Dubya's favorite "dishes") that Dubya would have banned them from being served at the White House.
Digby and Yglesias were right to this point but then they go on to say that U. S. Foreign Policy didn't need to be overhauled, it was working just fine (except for an occassional bone-headed move now and then).
Okay, fair enough but I think they're overlooking something important.
Prior to 9/11/01, Bush had already surrounded himself with some of the most flagrant "cold warriors" in the nation, particularly Cheney and Rumsfeld, and they, in turn, had staffed their office with only like-minded others and all of them ...all. of. them. were diciples of Leo Strauss.
When 9/11 did happen, these people rose to primacy within the Bush Adminsitration...it was the proverbial PERFECT STORM of FOREIGN POLICY HIJACKING. . It was no long just A. B. C. = Anything. But. Clinton. It was now a replay of the cold war played out in the oilfields of the Middle East
So Digby and Matt Yglesias are right to an extent....it DID start out as a repudiation of Clinton's policies but the ability to put the foreign policy strategies of Strauss into play took a remarkable event: 9/11. And nobody in Government would have accepted one single word of this crackpot scheme had it NOT been for 9/11.
Two words: BUT FOR
but for 9/11 the Straussian Neocons would have remeained in the background as a sick little joke. They would have been ridiculed until Bush was forced to disavow their crackpottery and they would have been shuffled off to the same dustbin of history where the Holucust Deniers dwell in their perpetual hell of denial. But For 9/11, Bush could not have afforded to embrace them with re-election looming in the future, and, always remember this: By September 1 of 2001, Bush's Presidency was already in trouble. He was looked upon as a "Johnny One-Note" (tax cuts, tax cuts, and tax cuts that was the only real policy interest he had at the time). But For 9/11, His approval ratings were already starting to slip to the 50% range.
Begs the question doesn't it?
You KNOW what question I' m thinking of, don't you?
